This STAAR pupil smart as a fifth-grader

Updated 12:28 am, Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Hints of an old “friend” returned — echoes of that familiar, chest-tightening, heart-pounding angst that accompanied each taking of a test back in my school daze.

This is the stuff of recurring nightmares for me.

So it's hard to imagine what feelings would have descended had the test actually meant something — perhaps meant the difference between advancing a grade or whether I graduated from high school at all.

That's precisely what's at stake for Texas students. Standardized tests to graduate are an old story in Texas. What's changed is how much harder and more comprehensive the testing has become under STAAR, which launched this week.

Maclovio Perez, the public information officer for Edgewood Independent School District, invited some journalists over on Monday to take a sample, truncated version of the fifth-grade STAAR test. It also had enough ninth-grade algebra questions thrown in to humble the math-challenged among us, me included.

It turns out I'm as smart as a fifth-grader, but ninth-grade algebra students have it all over me. “Domain of the function?” Huh?

Don't get me wrong. It's not the content we should object to here; it's the weight we are giving it — as if coerced learning and teaching can ever be a substitute for a more holistic, individualized, resourced approach.

We are, if you haven't already noticed, big on “accountability” in Texas, even if no standardized test has ever been invented that can measure the totality of what's learned and what's taught. And no test is completely equipped to pick out that student who doesn't merit advancement to fruitful adulthood. We pretend.

That's a lot riding on a test. Now multiply that by the minimum 30 to 34 STAAR tests that Texas students will take between third and 11th grades, depending on which graduation plan the student is on. Each test contributing, or not, to a cumulative score that will determine whether they will earn a diploma or what type it will be.

That number grows if students have to be retested. And this doesn't include other tests the schools might require.

Anna Nieto, Edgewood's director for curriculum instruction and assessment, proctored the test for the handful of journalists. She explained that, initially, STAAR testing will not count toward students' grade-point averages.

Still, the stakes are so high that devoting many of the nontest days to those test days will be unavoidable.

Which leads me to ask, do we think scaring students, teachers and principals into submission is a good substitute for enabling them with resources?

Others are noting the obvious.

Last weekend, John Kuhn, superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, told a Save Texas Schools crowd in Austin, “The government has allowed state testing to become a perversion, growing like Johnson grass through the garden of learning and choking to death all knowledge that isn't on the test.”

I'm only as smart as a fifth-grader but I've crafted a sample test question for state legislators.

If you short schools about $5 billion, call it an increase, force school layoffs but up the number of testing days and simultaneously rail about mandates from big government, this is an example of: